palmOne has promoted Ed Colligan to President. He moves up from senior vice president and general manager of the Wireless Business Unit.

Colligan, who ran Marketing for Palm, Inc. at the time of the first Pilot, left the company with Jeff Hawkins and Dona Dubinsky to create Handspring back in 1999. His position at Handspring was that of Chief Operating Officer until 2002 when he became the company's President.

He came back into the Palm fold last Fall, along with Hawkins and Dubinsky, when Palm acquired Handspring and renamed itself palmOne. The Wireless Business Unit, essentially the Handspring part of palmOne, has now been completely absorbed into the company.

"The integration of Handspring into palmOne is now complete with the consolidation of the handheld and wireless business units," said palmOne Chief Executive Officer Todd Bradley. "We're one company, with one compelling portfolio of devices that serves entry-level consumers to mobile professionals."

Areas of palmOne reporting to Colligan include worldwide channel, carrier and online sales; marketing; product marketing; and engineering. Former Handspring/Palm alumni and guiding light Hawkins has held the job of chief technology officer for palmOne since the Handspring merger, while Dubinsky took a seat on the company's board of directors.

Speaking of mergers, last month palmOne announced plans to take on the unenviable task of taking the software bundles it offers with its Zire and Tungsten handhelds and merging it with the bundle it delivers with the Treo 600 smartphones.

As of now, the Treo still offers the same software bundle, including web browser, SMS client and PIM software they did when palmOne acquired Handspring back in the Fall. By offering a single software bundle, palmOne would reduce the complexity of maintaining its products. But to do so would require the company to create a unified set of applications that would cut across some very different products.

This is one problem we're sure palmOne is happy to have, as the smartphone market is the fastest growing segment in mobile electronics. Canalys reported earlier this month that the worldwide mobile device market grew by 41% during the first quarter of this year over the first quarter of 2003.

The most significant growth took place, not surprisingly, in the nascent smartphone sector, which grew by 115%. Handhelds on the other hand grew at an anemic rate of 1%. And it appears the chief reason Canalys saw any handheld growth at all is because it lumped devices like Research In Motion and its BlackBerry handhelds, which did very well, and Pocket PC phones, such as T-Mobile's MDA II, into the wireless handheld category.

To PDAStreet and SmartPhoneToday, these types of devices are datacentric smartphones or smartphones that lean more toward the data side of the PDA/phone smartphone equation. Devices, such as most Symbian-based smartphones, Windows Mobile Smartphones and the majority of Palm-based smartphones lean more toward the phone side of the smartphone equation. These are the types of devices Canalys exclusively defined as smartphones.

While Nokia and its fellow Symbian licensees dominate most of the world with their smartphones, in North America, palmOne is the leading smartphone vendor with 37% share, ahead of Nokia (25%), Motorola (16%) and Samsung (15%).